


Wood and Iron

by baku_midnight



Category: Dead by Daylight (Video Game)
Genre: Anal Sex, Attempted Murder, Birth, Forced Pregnancy, Friendship, Gothic Au, Kidnapping, M/M, Mpreg, Mpreg Birth, Rape, Sexual Abuse, Sexual Assault, Violence, Witch Curses, gross scary stuff, hints of David x Dwight and Jake x Nea but it's pretty much platonic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:40:31
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23792497
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/baku_midnight/pseuds/baku_midnight
Summary: Sequel to “Batty Fang”. MacMillan’s menace is not yet extinct.
Relationships: Dwight Fairfield/Evan MacMillan | The Trapper
Comments: 4
Kudos: 89





	Wood and Iron

**Author's Note:**

> Slightly reworked. Mind the tags; Dwight gets it rough again.

The forest trail that led from the manor was decrepit and crowded over by spruces and mosses, but Dwight dared not take the wider road facing the sun and be faced with the same trouble as he had been before. Travelling by foot with little provisions and in the sun proved more taxing than he expected, and he could only blame his lack of haste on his recent fecund condition. He had gained no weight but understood that his body was shifting inside to make room, his organs rearranging and the opening to his womb growing more smooth and complete. He knew the science of it, understood the medicine but still lacked understanding as to how his condition had come about. Had something in the curse’s magic triggered in his body? It didn't matter. He needed only to go on, now, to find somewhere safe to bed in peace…though he scarcely expected that was possible.

It was long into the day when the narrow, trickling trail opened to reveal the outermost edge of Jake Park's forest property. It was fairly new, but the furtive forest grew in so quickly around it that it was hard to know. Firs dipped against the cleared grounds and lined the road in with brown needles. One side of the property supported a shed surrounded by metal parts such as those belonging to engines, farm machinery, and boilers. It was from this edge that Dwight entered, and shortly after, fell to the ground, the collected voice of Jake finding his ears vaguely, as if miles away.

Next he saw his world at a tilt, a tiny bedroom, recognized by the narrow bed and bedtable, making his new surroundings. The bedcoverings puffed as he wriggled on to his side, coming to face a collection of menacing figures seated on a low shelf. With a slight surprise, he noted them to be carved out of wood, only as tall as his forearm and a little thicker, in rudimentary anthropomorphic shapes. One had a black head and small eyes, another was a woman whose face had no features, and a third was a deformed, asymmetrical, as if carved in accordance with the gnarls and boles of the wood, man's face, its eyes arranged in an awkward slant.

"Totems," said Jake as he entered. "They were here since I arrived. Nea insists they stay."

Dwight tried to sit but changed his mind, remaining on his side but pushing up to his elbow to address his old friend. They had known each other through business, and came to appreciate one another's quiet fondness since. Jake tinkered with items and repaired old gadgets in the quiet of his retreat, which Dwight then attempted to sell. That venture seemed miles away, now, Dwight realized, as he clutched lightly at the bed covers.

"They represent evil demons; keeping their facsimiles is to ward off the real thing—apparently," Jake explained. "Though what manner of demons would stay in this forest, I don't know."

Dwight swallowed. It was better Jake never did know, and, if Dwight’s finalistic solution regarding the monster in the manor had taken firm hold, he would not.

Dwight explained that he would work for his keep until the winter was done, and then go back into town to realize a new life as a merchant in the safety of civilization—the traveller’s life was much too much for him. Jake was cordial, or, as much as he could be, being so very sensible as he was, wasting no words as he offered Dwight lodging and agreed that his going must have been difficult to find him broken and insensate on the edge of the property. Then, with a quiet sort of politeness, stilted as if unpracticed, he tilted his head and asked,

"As for your condition... that is, it was Nea who recognized it—how came you to it?"

Dwight sighed and told only the bit of his tale he dared. Jake needed not hear about the endless violations, the loveless sensuality of MacMillan’s movements between his legs, the heat of his breath, the feel of his toxic gaze. Dwight shared only that he fell into the company of a man who could not be trusted, and paid for his indiscretion.

Jake asked nothing more and simply led Dwight to take supper. Nea, it seemed, was a woman who shared the cabin with him, and though her appearance was unconventional and her attitude as strictly uncompromising as Jake’s, she was kind and helpful. Dwight was grateful for both of their company.

So began an easy routine—there were jobs to do, always, managing the colonial lifestyle, as it were: tending the livestock, cutting wood for the fireplace and boiler, hunting and gathering, cook, cleaning and preserving. Dwight gathered and cleaned the dishes in the kitchen, peering through the window over the sink.

Outside there was a man yet unknown to Dwight. He was thick in the chest and broad in the shoulder, by the look of his overlarge fur jacket and leather breeches. His hair was cropped short and his beard made him look all the more a woodsman while he chopped logs in front of the shed. His movements were easy, methodical, and Dwight wondered what manner of person he was: kind and forward like Jake, or a bristling villain like...

Dwight couldn't help his mind wandering back to MacMillan and his wickedness. Dwight knew the beast’s touch inside and out, and shuddered to remember it. The shape growing heedlessly within him made MacMillan’s presence constant, and what of that spectre Dwight saw in the door on the day that he left the manor? 

Dwight remembered seeing photos in the parlor of a young child under the arm of an oppressive father, and remembered also the photos to be dated in a curious manner. Peeling the backboard carefully from the frame, Dwight had spotted both the name Evan MacMillan and the date nearly a century in the past. Surely it was a mistake, or Evan shared a name with an ancestor, or else, was it some magic that granted his longevity? The same curse that confined him to the estate also kept age—and death—from touching him?

Dwight shook his head and returned his gaze to the woodsman outside. The fellow was stretching up to bring down the axe hard on the next log. He was bold and charming in a certain way, Dwight realized, as he returned to scrubbing pans in frigid water.

Shortly, the man made to come inside, and Jake stopped him on the porch. Through the open door Dwight saw them speak.

"...treat him with a gentle manner," Jake said slowly, and the man nodded, brow furrowed.

"What? Is he ill?" the man asked. His accent was of the old world, and quite thick.

Jake bit his lip and refrained from answering.

“I mean this truly. If you cause him harm, you will consider your accommodation here ended,” he said instead.

The man appeared offended. He raised his hand to his heart. “You think me a regular villain, but I’m kinder than a lamb.”

“A _lion_ , maybe,” Jake replied, but in a genial way.

Shortly, the man came inside, and upon seeing Dwight, looked him up and down, root to tip, as if examining a tree he meant to fell. Dwight was quiet.

“Forgive my incredulity,” the man said, “I didn’t think Jake had _any_ friends, apart from me.”

Dwight cracked a smile, and realized that was the first time he’d done so in months, or perhaps longer. He considered it an accomplishment, and from the smug grin the stranger brandished, it seemed he agreed.

David King was his name. He was hired by Jake to help around the homestead—apparently he had come to the country with no money and no prospects and begged for any sort of work; he slept in the shed and did the heavy lifting. Jake was good with his hands but his arms and back were slight and lacked a particular fortitude—David was happy to show off how he had in excess the physique Jake lacked, flexing his arms and making Dwight laugh again. Dwight wasn’t used to such showiness and wondered if it came from starting afresh in a new land, having no reputation to sully. David’s charm had Dwight almost forgetting his own sorry state: pregnant, poor, alone…he turned down his gaze to the floor and David quickly noticed.

“What troubles you?” David asked, and Dwight shook his head.

“Nothing, indeed,” he answered, “now, are you content to just stand there, or are you planning on doing any sort of work this day?”

David looked aghast in jest, and turned quickly to take a cup from the pile of cleaned dishes and scurry back outside.

In sleep, Dwight saw MacMillan towering at the end of his bed. He merely stared, and Dwight heard his heartbeat—or maybe it was his own—echoing in his ears like a drum, throbbing, pulsing, one beat after the other. The rough-wrought mask was the only part of him that wasn’t black and oozing, his body a mass of bloodied cuts and dark slop, like crude oil, or the fetid undergrowth in the parts of the forest too dark for the sun to reach. He stood a shifting shape, reaching out for Dwight, touching his knees and pulling them open wordlessly, while Dwight was unable to move in his dream. Dwight awoke hazily, tucking his toes under the thick covers.

In the morning, the cabin smelled of dew and the coldness of early fall. Shortly, a fire was built in the stove and forest tea put to steep, and David joined the three of them for breakfast. The days were remarkably short, and in the evening, they sat around the campfire outside while the skies remained free of rain and snow.

Jake and Nea were pressed together, Nea with a blanket around her slim shoulders and Jake with his gloves covered in soot from tending the fire. What, precisely, their acquaintance was Dwight did not ask, but they were close indeed, and amiable in their interactions. They watched each other for minute changes in demeanor, and spoke without words as they worked through the day. Nea caught rabbits in snares outside of the camp, and Jake shot deer with his bow, and they both cleaned game and returned to the cabin with blood up to their elbows.

It left David and Dwight to the other side of the fire, and they sat close to one another, while David told fantastic stories of his history—the people with whom he had made acquaintance seemed otherworldly, but then, since Dwight’s last dalliance with unusual folk, he thought they _could_ be real: a woman with dark skin who could make plants come to life with the wave of her hands, a slight girl who ran faster than a locomotive, a man with an entirely mechanical hand, and a man who stood tall as a tree but was quiet as a moth, and whose drawings in ink and charcoal took on lives of their own, stood a few of the people David had met in his journey. David had gotten in with a dangerous crowd back in the old country, he said, before he left that life behind for a new adventure on the other side of the ocean. The trip by steamer had been very treacherous indeed, and Dwight listened intently to how the seas had conspired, apparently, to take David away with them before he made landfall. It was a matter of weeks after landing ashore before he found Jake and begged for work, and before which he met so many colourful sorts.

Dwight watched as sparks from the fire danced above it, while beyond, the black forest gaped between sentinel-like trees. In the wood, he saw a masked face emerging, ringed in fire, and with blood pouring down his neck in great, mahogany gushes. Dwight flinched and turned his head.

“What is it?” David asked, reaching for his shoulder, “what haunts you?”

Dwight shook his head. “Nothing, except the ingenuity of your tall tales. Another one?”

David obliged.

It didn’t take long for Dwight to begin to feel a twinge of delight upon seeing David, as much as he did Jake and Nea, and not only because of his boldness. David saw Dwight genuinely, without pretense and indeed, as a whole man, rather than an object, or a means to an end. He was friendly without ulterior purpose, and although Dwight could only imagine how his approach would cool when he knew of his history, for now, his company was welcome indeed.

In the night, Dwight awoke with a start to find the door to his room split open as if with a cleaver, swinging limply on its hinges. He stood up to examine what had happened and when he approached the doorframe, felt a hand on his throat hoisting him up, pushing him back and tossing him upon the bed. Dwight recognized the touch of the hand and the smell of the body before seeing that it was the beast who menaced him, whose scent was still as fresh and familiar as autumn rain: Evan MacMillan.

MacMillan, with subtle difficulty, came through the doorframe, ducking his head and leading with his marred shoulders as he entered the tiny bedroom, and as he came, all Dwight could think was that this was _impossible_. The beast was dead. He was dead!

“There you are,” MacMillan greeted, as he trudged inside, dragging his overlong cleaver across the floor where it scraped messily on the wood, digging a gouge which it filled with soiled blood. “To think you would leave the comfort of my home for _this_ shabby abode.”

Dwight stared up at him, then through the open door whence he’d come. There lay the bodies of his three companions, easily dispatched by MacMillan’s cleaver: Jake was face-down in his fluids, a bear trap clamped around his shin; Nea was draped over the couch, her slack mouth vomiting blood, and David was hung up on the wall, a knife embedded in his shoulder to hold him aloft. Dwight tried to get up and run. No. _No,_ it couldn’t be.

MacMillan shoved him easily back down with a hand on his shoulder, and Dwight yelped as his head hit the headboard. He lifted a hand to touch the back of his skull, a hand which MacMillan shortly snatched and by which dragged him up the bed. He tossed his cleaver to the floor where it hit with a _clang_ and climbed the tiny mattress with his knees.

“No, no!” Dwight screamed, kicking his feet but finding no leverage. MacMillan turned him over to his front and took his wrists behind his back, clasping them in one, thick hand. With the other, he wrenched down Dwight’s undergarments, revealing the white mounds of his buttocks and giving them a sharp _smack_.

“You thought you could be free from me?” MacMillan said, with another smack. From his tone, it seemed he was being playful, but Dwight just shuddered in terror. The beast squeezed Dwight’s rump with a calloused palm, dipping a single finger into the cleft and sliding up and down the slit. Dwight kicked and jerked to no avail, and MacMillan planted his knees between Dwight’s to spread them.

“Don’t do this,” Dwight cried, pressing his face into the pillow, “Evan, my…my love, _please._ ”

MacMillan chuckled and pressed his fat cock into the cleft of Dwight’s rear, enjoying the slide along the smooth parting of his cheeks, opening him incrementally with each little push. “How could you be free of me, my prize? We’re connected, you and I, right _here._ ” He took his cock in one weathered hand and pushed it inside without another word.

Dwight screamed and rose up, the arch of his back inadvertently bringing MacMillan deeper, the curve of his spine leading MacMillan in like an arrow finding its mark. Dwight panted, legs tightening, thigh muscles turning to ropes of steel before weakening again, his knees falling loose and parted. The pain _burned_ , made Dwight’s recollection hazy, and after a few treacherous thrusts, no more than weak, muffled moans came from his lungs.

“Perfect,” MacMillan murmured, “your body remembers me well. It’s memorized my shape.” He released Dwight’s hands to take up his hips instead, and lift them so his back bowed and slanted to the better angle for MacMillan to deposit his shaft deep into Dwight’s guts. Dwight breathed the musty scent of the bed’s straw mattress, it failing to disguise MacMillan’s putrid smell, and the scent of blood from his butchered companions.

Jake, Nea. David. In a way, Dwight expected this. He knew would not be free of MacMillan’s curse, not ever.

“How does it feel, my pet?” MacMillan asked, voice low and hideous, “having me inside you again?” His back arched and it led his monstrous shaft deeper, until Dwight felt it jab at the base of his spine, wringing electric-shock pleasure from his aching body. Below his hips grew fiery hot. His hands trembled on the pillow where he gripped it weakly beside his ears.

“You know, I never left,” MacMillan goaded, thrusts growing short and quick, and still mercilessly deep, “my seed is in you, my vestige right… _here._ ” He reached beneath Dwight’s hips to his abdomen and stroked the insignificant swell with sand-coarse fingers. Dwight buried his eyes in the pillow. MacMillan massaged the spot, low on his trunk, sliding his fingertips through the trail of hair beneath the navel, while he thrust inside, as if trying to bring his cock to meet his fingers.

“Your cunt opened only for me, just for me,” MacMillan whispered, “and the seed inside you is only mine. You are _only mine_.” His grip turned rough, and MacMillan dug his fingers sharply into Dwight’s belly, stabbing into the swell and making a sharp pain echo up his front, shooting up his sternum and spreading across his breast and Dwight was startled awake.

Dwight returned to sensibility shaking, staring at the ceiling. His vision shifted upright as he looked to the closed door, finding it latched and intact, and unmarred. A sharp wave of nausea rose up in him before he could dwell any longer on what might be beyond it, and he rushed to the portal, unlocking it and running outside. Beside the cabin he wretched and vomited, dropping to his knees in the rocky soil and spilling bile into the weeds that bordered the tiny abode.

Breakfast was made of eggs from the chickens, smoked venison and dense bread Dwight had thankfully little trouble eating. Over the meal, he asked what acquaintance Jake and Nea held and they merely gave him wood-eyed looks, and David nearly choked on his meal, guffawing so hard, he was. Dwight was simply taken aback, but decided to ask nothing more.

The cabin was small but splendid, a terrific contrast to the mansion in which he’d been sequestered like a doll, an antique or a toy, for months previous. The wood was in broad cedar logs treated only gently to preserve their bright salmon colour, as well as their properties to repel water. Dwight understood that Jake had felled them all himself, and for months while living in a tent in the middle of a dripping copse, built his own home in defiance of his parents’ fortune. Dwight could only admire the handiwork, running his fingers across the logs as he walked, himself never so adept at making things with his own power.

He found Jake behind the shed, his gloved hands deep in the guts of a neutered machine of some sort, an engine perhaps, tinkering in silence with a frown on his face.

“I must thank you,” Dwight said, softly, escorting the fingers, which were travelling to his mouth out of nervous habit, elsewhere to his pocket. “I had nowhere else to go. The sum of my fortune was stolen on the road. I…”

“No need,” Jake replied, twisting a nut onto a stubborn bolt, rust clicking and flaking off with each rotation. “I have the place, and you are an extra hand.”

Dwight lowered his gaze, hand moving to his midsection. “Soon, I’ll bring an extra mouth.”

Jake didn’t respond for a preoccupied moment, and then, “worry not about that. Bring me that wrench, will you?”

Dwight pondered being a merchant again. Maybe it would be henceforth in a shop, rather than upon the road that he would vend his wares. The city seemed far safer, now, with its walls and certainty.

“Machines are better than human company, I’ve found,” Jake said, working his wrist hard as he pulled at a latch that seemed content to stay sealed in place. “They are expectable,” he mumbled, “they do as anticipated.”

Dwight chuckled. “And what about Nea? Does she do as anticipated?” He couldn’t help but further the question, although Jake merely raised an eyebrow. He replied in the negative, and then they both laughed, and it was a warm and kindly air that flowed between them, even as the chill morning held low to the ground, as here under mossy branches the sun did not reach to warm it away.

“Perhaps you can build yourself a friend,” Dwight teased.

“Mind yourself, or I _will_ turn you away,” Jake said, though he suppressed a grin

Nea was on the deck, cobbling the boots of every member of the household in so much as it was needed: sewing tears in the tongues, patching the sheepskin soles. With this, Dwight felt confident he could assist; he’d been apprentice to a cobbler years ago, and set to work putting nails in the heels that had come loose. As they worked, he saw the cloth that was laid across Nea’s lap. It was embroidered in a curious pattern, old and intricate, with loops of red thread through the white cotton making a continuing pattern of flowers and sigils.

“Do you miss your home?” Dwight asked, and Nea tilted her head. Her hair was hidden all beneath a fur cap, save a squiggle of ruddy brown that trailed the side of her temple.

“Not until I left it did I even consider it such,” Nea said, “I suppose I miss the simplicity of youth.”

Dwight nodded. They worked for hours, until the sun was low and they were absolutely satisfied with their efforts, and arranging the pairs of boots carefully in a row on the mat, Nea spoke up.

“As for your child,” she said, “I can bring my friend Claudette to assist with the delivery. She often makes trips into these woods to search for herbs for her apothecary, and she is knowledgeable in medicine.”

Dwight felt a swell of warmth in his chest and realized, unabashedly, that he was grateful for this thing he had gone so long without that he expected he might never have it again, or might never deserve it again: companionship. The kind touch of a friend. At supper—a veritable feast of cured pork, apples and wild asparagus—Dwight watched the three of them, Jake, Nea and David, with newfound reverence and a warm spirit in his heart that lingered all the way until bed.

Dwight turned over to the sound of metal scrapping, screeching and squealing like a knife on a whetstone, the sound high and cloying. He sat up to the horror of hinged traps, in a myriad of tones of walnut brown and black, rust red and mahogany, in different sizes for bears, wolves, foxes and other prey, filling his room. Surrounding the bed, they were set so near to each other as to be nearly overlapping, their wide maws open like blooming flowers in some twisted garden. MacMillan was silhouetted in the doorway, his black shadow haloed in a fiery yellow glow.

“Having good dreams?” he said, and stepped inside. He easily found a safe path through the traps, seeming to float over them entirely, his strides long and falling lightly. He was naked save his mask, and blood that seeped from his neck such that it seemed to dress him. His skin, mottled with crisscross scars and needle-thin cuts, was sopped in dark, oozing red.

Dwight’s heart began to pound. He moved to one side of the bed, peering over at the undulation of sickly flowers, metal petals fluttering and reaching, and scrambling to the other side, saw merely the same. His hands trembled as he backed up to the headboard, in time for MacMillan’s knee to fall heavily onto the mattress between his shivering knees.

Blood dribbled down the sides of MacMillan’s neck in two thick rivulets, like strings of rotten pearls, all the way down his torso, lining the sides of his abdomen. He seized Dwight’s throat with a thick hand, dragging him down so that he lay crosswise on the bed, his hips on one side and his head the other. Dwight gasped and clawed at the hand securing him to null avail, kicking when the beast divested him of his sleeping clothes, tearing the garments to shreds and infecting them with his terrible ichor.

He knelt between Dwight’s thighs a moment, securing him at the throat and examining his pale body.

“How lovely it is to have friends to confide in,” MacMillan mocked, “would you like to share this moment with them?”

Dwight sobbed, eyes going dark as MacMillan pushed inside, his fat shaft parting Dwight’s flesh, broaching ring after ring until he was accepted deep inside. Tears sprang to Dwight’s eyes but he could no more protest than he could wriggle free, the trapper’s hand applying just enough pressure to his throat to strain his breathing and restrict his speech, the beast’s legs holding his parted. While he thrusted forward Dwight’s head fell back, over the edge of the mattress until the crown was just above the reach of a bear trap, the teeth narrowly tangling in his ebon hair.

“Do you not know that _I_ am all that you need?” MacMillan insisted, a playful rumble in his deep voice, which shortly grew coarse with anger. “ _I_ am all you need. I am what makes you…”

Dwight felt his vision grow dark as the fingers tightened around his throat. He imagined his ankles secured in bear traps, and his wrists, holding him splayed open, like the hide of a beast, set to tan. His stomach ached with Evan’s attentions, skin tingling wherever he was touched. When Evan came, with his burning seed inside came a gush of blood down his front, sopping Dwight’s chest, painting his belly. With effort he looked up to see Evan above him soaking in blood, such that it was as though he had bathed in it, such that he had looked when Dwight left him alone in that mansion.

For the first time in weeks, Dwight considered that perhaps MacMillan had survived, if only seconds after Dwight left him with a dress of blood and a parting kiss. But it was impossible. No one could lose so much blood and remain alive. But the magic of the mansion had kept the man alive through countless years. Perhaps… no.

A tap on the door awoke Dwight, and Nea’s playful shout from the hall, “wake now, hanger-on!” followed by her bright laugh and Jake’s soft rebuttal. The pair left almost immediately after the morning meal was done, to hunt in the surrounding copse, leaving Dwight and David alone to do the dishes in genial quiet.

The day seemed too short, as winter approached and the sun fell sooner, and soon enough, it was dark and the campfire beckoned. Gooseflesh rose on Dwight’s cold skin.

Dwight went into his room that night, the vision of his comrades flayed in the foyer by MacMillan’s nasty cleaver and traps suffusing in his mind’s eye as he looked at the small bed, table, chest, and indeed the totems that sat sentry on the shelf.

He trailed his fingers along the smoothed tops of the totems—they brought good luck, Nea had said, so her grandmother had taught her long ago—watching the small-eyed one blink at him and the deformed, melted face twinkle, and decided he could stay in the room no longer. Disguising his steps as best as he could on the creaking oaken boards, Dwight went back outside, and strode across camp to the shed.

The shed was small, with a roof that was collecting moss, fir needles and cones in abundance, and a small awning that shielded the wood pile, stacked up against the other wall, from the rain. Dwight knocked on the door and David appeared, his eyes wide.

“I thought I might see where the help sleeps,” Dwight teased, shrugging. He wore a long, thick coat made in bear skin, borrowed from Jake, but even beneath it, his shoulders were cold.

“Says the freeloader,” David snapped back, but with geniality in his tone.

They went inside. The space was small, and only a tiny quarter of the floor was left clear, the width and length of David’s height, for him to bed down. It was stacked with furs of bear, wolf, elk and reindeer, a quilt and pillows. All surrounding the small bedding area were supplies for the camp: tools on one wall, including shovels, hoes, saws, hammers and rifles; more firewood was on another, and a defunct steam generator and several parts for tinkering filled a third. Shelves and cabinets encroached on the small space, lending an air of cramped coziness.

David turned up the lantern and pulled on his gloves. “Begging your pardon, but my chores aren’t yet done for the night.”

“Let me help you,” Dwight commented, “I can’t sleep.”

They went back outside, and David started hauling stacks of cut logs inside to dry. He piled them by the wall and Dwight followed suit, taking smaller stacks out of consideration of his condition, but the work was restful for the mind as it was tiring for the body. After several trips, the glow of the lantern and the blue edge of nighttime the only light guiding their path, Dwight was swiping sweat from his brow, his coat falling open to admit the chilly air. David reached to pat him on the shoulder in the manner of a job well done, but stopped with his hand hovering awkwardly in the air, and Dwight wondered a moment the cause for his hesitancy, and then noticed that his belly was sticking starkly out.

Suddenly the warmth of his sweat turned to clamminess, and Dwight felt his heart hitch and gather tight together. David was sniffing at the air, and even though it was very much out of fashion of late to scent a gentleman without his permission, David seemed to be flexing muscles he wasn’t sure he still possessed. He looked concerned, curious, and Dwight felt his self-consciousness rising a breadth with each second that passed in silence.

“You’re…” David uttered. He did not move away in disgust, like Dwight rather expected, but instead put his hands on Dwight’s shoulders, as if to steady him, like Dwight was fragile, like he might fall to his knees in a second. This was what Dwight feared: to be looked upon as a burden or tragedy rather than a man.

“Widowed, you might say,” Dwight whispered, and in the way he ducked his face in shame, David must’ve sensed his distress, and led him to come and sit on the bench outside of the shed.

“What happened?”

Dwight told all that he dared. It felt liberating to share at least the broader details, and he realized midway through the tale that there were tears on his cheeks. He wiped them off with the back of his hand and wondered if David could see them in the very low light of the camp at midnight. Above only shone a waning moon, hidden low behind a wiry copse of beech, and a smattering of stars that could be made out through the space in the canopy that the cabin made. On the back of David’s neck glowed a subtle, white lamp light from inside the cabin.

“Did he handle you roughly?” David asked, and Dwight pondered it.

“Only as much as was necessary to bend me into a pleasing pose,” Dwight replied, stroking a silent tear from his eye with his thumb, “if I struck him, he merely laughed. You might not believe me, but know that he was _twice_ even _your_ size, and any strike from my fists was no more damaging than the bite of a flea, I’m sure.”

David shook his head. He was looking at his lap, and the fist curled there. He looked angry, and concerned, in that awful way someone feels when they learn a distant acquaintance has taken ill and there is nothing he can do.

“He wouldn’t hurt me with his fists, though I know he was capable of it and worse. He only wanted me to…” Dwight looked briefly down at his stomach. At a few short months, he barely showed, but it was the odd, high placement of the bulge on his abdomen that gave him away.

“But he is dead?” David asked, “dead by your very hand?”

“I bled him like a slaughtered cow,” Dwight answered, “his blood covered my hands like I’d dipped them in a _river_ thereof.”

“And you watched him die? He is quite gone? The curse is done?” David went on, desperately curious.

“You can no more challenge his ghost to fisticuffs,” Dwight replied, laughing weakly, “than I can return to the time before I met him. Before he cursed me with his…”

He sighed. He was properly tired, now, though a diminished sadness now hung around his head, and, he expected, would colour his dreams. But at least he could sleep, as fitful as it might be. As he stood to leave, David spoke.

“I should’ve liked to wallop him one,” David said, “it’s not beyond my proficiencies.”

Dwight chuckled, uncommonly grateful for this, what he realized, was friendship. He had an ally—three of them, in fact, for whom he could give his best and who would give their best for him. He stayed up with David a little longer, as the man regaled him with stories of running from the constabulary down cobblestone streets—cobblestone! What a treat. Such sights adorned only Dwight’s childhood picture books—and brawling with urchins and thieves. So followed tales of narrowly escaping punishment while limping from wounds. Members of his company—Adam, Jeff, Ash—came to his rescue at the last moment as he caught an iron poker to the face—hence the slash mark over his left eye. Dwight listened, contented, for a few hours more, and when he went to sleep, found his nightmares abolished, if only for temporary happenstance.

In the toilet, Dwight held his fingers over his belly, stroking the shape up and down. He wondered when it had happened: was it the day that MacMillan planted him on his front, knees parted and chest pressed flat into the mattress, back arched in the shape of a mating animal, and deposited seed into his belly while Dwight bit the pillow? Or was it when the beast had found Dwight in the kitchen and suspended him up over the sink, his feet dangling behind the trapper’s hips and his wrists going sore where they held his weight above the countertop? Or perhaps it was the morning he’d spent tied to an ornate armchair by his ankles while MacMillan rutted into him with such force it’d splintered the wood?

Dwight had half a mind to ask him and the opportunity to do the same when MacMillan appeared to him over his bed that night. He’d long since realized that MacMillan’s visits were only in his mind, and indeed that was the only place the beast would ever again menace him. But a menace he still was.

His massive size, to dwarf the girth of any of the ashes and beeches that surrounded the camp, stood over Dwight’s bed in the dark, his nakedness mottled with old, soil-brown blood, his cleaver freshly applied. He dragged Dwight up by the chin, throwing his legs wide and shoving inside. The girth of him tore Dwight freshly open, and Dwight squirmed and keened in vain protest, wrists pinned to the pillow above his head.

“Did you think you could ever suffer anyone else?” MacMillan asked, jerking his hips ruthlessly forward, and prying Dwight’s jaw open with his other hand. Instead of quiet groans of displeasure, soft yelps and whimpers were broken free, and Dwight shook his head. “You’re too used to me now. Not a moment goes by that you don’t remember my shape inside you.” He thrusted pointedly, making Dwight clench, his toes in socks curling.

“You’re a…fiend,” Dwight stuttered out, jaw parted forcefully by MacMillan’s thick, wood-hard fingertips. He lifted his foot and brought the heel down into MacMillan’s back, to vain effect. He willed these bad dreams to end, though he wondered more than once if this wasn’t his reality: pinioned, like a butterfly under glass, to be a receptacle of MacMillan’s ejaculate, while the free world turned around beyond his reach.

“You have a preference, clearly,” MacMillan answered, and taking Dwight’s knees one in each hand, thrust in high and hard, making the boy jolt and arch his back. His neck strained, apple scraping the sky as he threw back his head in torture, panting. The pain was overwhelming, and the memory of nerve-rending pleasure stunned him still.

“D-don’t,” Dwight struggled to say, gripping the sheets. He tilted his hips to pull away from the cock spearing up inside him, but Evan dragged him back. He gripped Dwight’s waist and pushed him back on, enjoying the way his thighs seized in response to taking his full length. “No more…!”

‘“No more’?” MacMillan pondered, “evidently you cannot last long without a villain’s seed inside you,” his mask grinned, the teeth flecked with blood, “that woodsman you have your eye on? You know he is one.”

_David?_ The man’s collected look, his beard and kind eyes took up Dwight’s vision and he gasped out the man’s name, to MacMillan’s endless amusement. Dwight’s eyes flew wide, and he struck out his arms, scrambling to grip the headboard and drag himself away. MacMillan took his wrists and gripped them tightly enough to bruise, Dwight realizing with horror that he exercised only a tiny amount of his monumental strength. He couldn’t hear this—he wished to wake from this horror, but MacMillan only spoke more loudly.

“The goodly-seeming lumberjack who hails from nowhere? Yes, that one. The one whom you’d gladly welcome in between your thighs,”—MacMillan pushed in deep to illustrate his impatience, and his solitary possession of that space—“he is like me: a _killer_.”

“It’s not like that,” Dwight shook his head. David could no more be compared to this monster above him than could fire and water. David was kind and hardworking, and his countenance held positive regard for Dwight, such being more than he had come to expect. He was a friend.

MacMillan laughed. Dwight couldn’t stand to hear the beast’s deceits.

MacMillan began to thrust with wanton force, his hips snapping hard against Dwight’s thighs with each push. “He’s a murderer, just like me: your husband. Your _master_.” He groaned, a land-rending sound like the felling of distant trees, as he came, spilling rich fluid into Dwight’s aching, accepting channel, flooding the entrance to his womb with seed. Dwight breathed as the shaft withdrew from him, only to return seconds later as he was thrown over onto his front to be filled again and again.

Now that five months had grown to six, and then seven, Dwight’s belly could no longer be hidden beneath his trousers and shirt. The buttons did not cinch over his stomach, and his belt had to be abandoned. He felt a monster in his own skin. He wore David’s and Jake’s shirts, the former being larger enough than Dwight, and the latter partial enough to baggy clothing to suit the purpose. For the last several months, Dwight had not thought about his pregnancy in much detail, able to ignore his condition, and put it to the background of his thoughts. But now it rose to the forefront, swelling out in front of him, an intrusive reminder of his imprisonment.

But surely he could not blame the baby for its father’s evil. The creature was innocent, unexposed to the ills of the world, and Dwight did not hate it. He feared only one demon, and that demon was dead. Of this Dwight was certain. It was only that he wasn’t certain that he himself was not _also_ dead, trudging through the afterlife, in solitude, his newfound friends David and Nea simply peculiarities of his dreaming death throes. So cleanly the partition of life and death seemed cleaved, and how easily MacMillan walked across it… Did it matter? Alive or dead—was there even a separation?

The morning rose to such little fanfare Dwight wondered if the night didn’t simply continue, endless, an unbroken darkness, stretching on and on. The eastern sky, and indeed all of the ceiling, was dull grey, the sun snuffed out by layers and layers of impassible cloud. A mild winter would come soon, and during that dark season, his child. Dwight tucked his chin beneath the coverlet and rolled to his side, peering upon the totems that brooded wickedly at his bedside with a sort of familiar interest. They stared unblinkingly back at him.

Chores took most of the day, and the dull weather proved perfect for hunting, as the windless, wet air disguised the scent of the hunters. Without rain, clearing the fallen brush was simple. As fall approached, needles and leaves spattered the grounds and clogged the eaves, and David went to work to clear them while Jake and Nea once again took to the woods to stalk their prey.

Midevening, David was building the fire in the stove in the cabin, going back and forth from the shed to ferry logs from the damp scenery and into the dry room. Dwight helped until his middle started to ache and cramp, the growth of seven months weighing heavily off of his front. He then brought only kindling, embarrassed by his weakness, but with lingering echoes of MacMillan’s words in his ears.

He is one. Murderer.

Dwight paused before the wood stack, looking at David curiously. Surely it was a trick, a hallucination, just like every other. MacMillan’s poison still festering inside him like the beast’s seed was growing beneath his ribs. But unease still held Dwight as he watched David trudge back and forth across the yard, his knees bending and back rounding to pick an armful of timber, his cheeks slightly reddened by the cold and the effort of his tireless work.

“Will you tell me?” Dwight asked, suddenly, staring at David.

David paused from stuffing damp leaves into a sack to use for tinder—they would smoke awfully, but there was little other choice. He rose, looking curiously at Dwight.

“Tell you what?”

“You said you had to leave the old country because you fell in with a dangerous crowd,” Dwight continued, voice soft, “but what precisely compelled you leave?”

David’s brows raised upon his forehead and he leveled Dwight a serious look, one that reproached and warned. But he said nothing. Between one breathless moment and the next, Jake and Nea appeared from the woods, holding their bounty—a brace of rabbits, and an armful of wild cabbage. The nature of three sets of curious eyes upon him seemed to worry David, and he tossed his chores to the ground, and made fists at his sides.

“I don’t know how you think of me,” David said, “but I am no monster who stalks at night! I am just a man, plain as can be—!”

“David,” Dwight implored, softly, and the man’s face fell. In fact, David’s expression grew fierce, and a row of teeth appeared in a snarl.

“Do you truly want to know?” David hissed, and drew closer to Dwight. Dwight did not flinch, only because months of domestic torture had steadied his form—there was nothing, now, that man or beast could do to him that hadn’t been done. But it pained him to see David’s teeth clenched and his eyes narrow with distaste.

“I ran afoul of a nobleman’s son—rather, he ran afoul of _me,_ ” David pushed his clenched fist against his chest. “He put his hands upon a young girl and intruded upon her in the coarsest way. I pulled him aside and beat him bloody. Can you see? His features were destroyed; he looked a ruined sculpture in clay.”

Dwight swallowed. He could sense Jake coming nearer to him, and Nea even raising her bow to point at David, who stalked yet closer.

“I beat the fiend down, and before my mates could remove me from him, he was dead. His father, being of great influence, brought me to task, and threatened all whom I knew. I had no recourse, and the law would not help me, because the nobleman paid their wages. My father paid for my freedom with what of my inheritance I hadn’t yet squandered, but made me go away, and no longer called me son. I had to leave my home. My alternative was imprisonment or death.”

Dwight’s eyes were wide. So it was true. The man before him was a killer, a destroyer of life. Was MacMillan right, or Dwight’s own instinct putting the words in the beast’s mouth?

“Do you wish to know the truth of it?” David whispered, leaning near enough for Dwight to feel his breath. “The truth is I regret it not. I would do the same again. I long to do the same to the one who violated _you_.”

Dwight gasped but could not look away. David then turned to stomp away, leaving his chore quite abandoned. He fled down the drive, past the chicken coop and further beyond.

For the daylight that remained, Dwight sat stunned by a fire, prodded only to that position by Jake’s insistence to protect his fragile midsection. He stared into the stove as Nea shoved a few more sticks to be engulfed by the flames, their oranges and yellows flickering off of Dwight’s spectacles.

He had lead David away, because of MacMillan’s poison. It was the curse that still clung at his bones like tar. He would never be free of it. To think, he allowed MacMillan to send away a light in his dull life—how _dare_ he let such a thing enter his senses, the same way he’d let MacMillan enter his body? David… he was no monster. He was a man—rough, loud, energetic, and kind in a flawed way that endeared him to Dwight. How could this happen?

The crunch of gravel alerted of a presence outside, and Dwight leapt to his feet, the blanket tucked around his shoulders falling limply to the floor. Dwight dashed for the front door—the portal locked on his insistence after too many nightmares of forced entry—and opened the lock. Aware was he that Jake was stood at one shoulder and Nea the other. David walked up the drive.

“I’m sorry,” Dwight said, “I should not have pushed you. Your past is your own. You…”

David’s arms came to his shoulders, and pulled him into a tight embrace, bearing in mind the hump of his middle. Dwight shrank into the embrace, the kindest handling he’d had in such a long time, his chin falling to David’s shoulder. He smelled of the outdoors, but not the putrid scent of iron and coal and fetid earth, like MacMillan, but fog and spruce and moss instead.

Shortly, Dwight felt Jake’s firm arm about his shoulder, and Nea leaning against the other. They stood in quiet embrace, and Dwight, tucked tightly between them, felt not trapped, but contained, comforted, and emboldened. He felt as if he could accomplish anything, defeat any demon, so long as he had his friends near him.

David appeared less pacified. He was uncharacteristically silent for the evening, the words to express whatever tormented him unknown to him, instead sighing as he sharpened tools, cleaned parts and did what was needed. The light in his eyes, when Dwight could indeed see them, was dim, grey, like a stove dimly lighted. Anger simmered in him, indeed, and it was an anger Dwight recognised, for it was the same he had suffered for months in MacMillan’s capture.

Anger, however, had faded to sadness, mourning, and eventually complacency, and as much as Dwight hated to admit it, he ceased hating MacMillan near the end of his captivity. There was no hatred strong enough to protect Dwight’s heart, nor defend his body from violation, so he simply stopped feeling it.

David, however, seemed to be seething with it. His brow was furled, pressed tightly at the centre of his forehead, and he could not look Dwight in the eyes.

“Hark,” Dwight whispered, as they did the dishes by the window, “nothing haunts you here,” he touched a hand to David’s shoulder, and with the sudden compulsion to inspire, continued, “we face no evil.”

David breathed out through his nose, not raising his gaze to Dwight’s, but his hackles seemed to fall, just perfunctorily, grip loosening on the cloth he wrung until the fibres stretched and creaked.

With one last, straining, groaning push the baby was out, its diminutive shape slipping loose from his body and into Evan’s waiting hands. Dwight collapsed backwards against the chair, chest shuddering with the force of his miserable panting. The pain of contractions and the stretch between his hips faded from a sharp, knife-like stabbing, to a dull throb, like static electricity buzzing in his middle and travelling up his limbs.

He was slightly reclined on a stack of pillows, a small blanket covering only his midsection, with his feet placed mercifully in stirrups and secured with leather belts, as after two days of labour it became too taxing to hold them aloft himself. He had been in labour for so long, and spent what felt to be the whole second half of it pushing. MacMillan, as promised, did nothing but watch, occasionally stroking Dwight’s thigh or placing a palm over his clenching belly, to feel the way it tightened and hardened to steel with each contraction.

Beyond exhausted, Dwight peered between his knees, through which now he could actually see, as his belly no longer obscured the view. The trapper carefully held the baby, severed the cord, and placed it in a waiting basinet. His stained and scarred hands held the baby entirely, one palm large enough to subsume its entire, tiny skull.

“Is the baby alright?” Dwight asked. He was drawn to the little thing, as detestable as its origins were, and especially did not want to see it harmed after spending so much work to bring it into the world. From beyond his suspended feet, he heard a soft mewling.

“It is,” MacMillan assured. He had not taken off his mask, but why would he, after spending every waking moment obscured by its veneer?

“But what about you?” MacMillan asked, but his tone was anything but concerned. He voice was tinged still with madness, and what about the birth of his child would change that? He stepped between Dwight’s thighs, rubbing a hand over his deflated belly. It was still soft and swollen, and the afterbirth remained inside; a few latent contractions rocked its white surface. “You must be exhausted.”

Dwight breathed through his nose, nodding. The trapper’s look was menacing, and his hand glided low, lower down his abdomen, through the brush of wiry hair and then yet lower. Dwight flinched as MacMillan’s coarse fingers found his sensitive hole, swollen and gaping slightly, trickling with fluid. MacMillan pushed a finger in.

“No, you can’t,” Dwight shook his head in disbelief, trying to wriggle free from the chair, but his ankles were firmly secured.

“‘Can’t’ what? Go inside here?” MacMillan whispered, pushing a second finger in and sweeping the circle of Dwight’s throbbing opening. Dwight flinched, jerking his neck, but the sudden movement made his head throb, and the light behind his eyelids grow until he saw white and collapsed again.

“Seems like it’s just open for me, now,” MacMillan commented, “I could get right inside without any hindrance. Plant another baby inside your womb…”

Dwight felt faint. Surely it was madness. Surely his post-partum, pain-addled mind was planting false shapes. But the thick fingers inside his swollen hole were real, and prodding with curious insistence. They pushed in and withdrew to almost no opposition, the tiny hole made weak after hours of holding the baby’s head behind it. It took a whole night of pushing, when finally, when the sun’s light started to trickle over the horizon in a vermilion stain, the head arrived. It took another hour for the baby to come.

“Evan, don’t,” Dwight tried, reaching out for anything—the chair was too far from the side table to reach it, and MacMillan too far to shove away, scratch, or grab. “It won’t…you can’t.”

MacMillan worked his fingers in deeper, enjoying the way Dwight’s innards, swollen and convulsing, slowly began to regain their shape and tighten around him. The pink tinge of his private, inner space was tantalizing, and he was tempted to keep feeding in his hand, to see how far up it would go. Instead, he pulled back, circling the rim with a hooked finger.

“I loved watching you struggle, watching you cry,” MacMillan hissed, “when you said, ‘it’s too big, it’s too big, I can’t do it’.”

Dwight squeezed his eyes shut, remembering the desperate mantra that had parted his lips hours before. He really didn’t think he _could_ do it, not when the pressure was so strong it made his hips go numb and him feel as though he were buried waist-deep in quicksand, pressed in from all sides, extruded. He felt his apple dip in a swallow. He’d resisted tears for his entire ordeal, but now…

“‘ _It’s too big,_ ’” MacMillan mocked, voice high and subtle, “ _God._ It reminded me of how you sounded first taking my cock. Do you remember? Remember the way you sobbed, and insisted it was just too large for your little body?”

Dwight shook his head. He wanted no more of this. He kicked but his feet were tied fast, and even unrestrained he expected he couldn’t move, not with how tired he was. MacMillan was taking himself out of his overalls; Dwight could hear as much in the shuffle of leather, the clang of metal fastenings. He was still half-shocked that MacMillan would actually do it, but then, there was little this creature was incapable of.

The push came like a searing metal rod climbing up his spine. Dwight screamed, the sound broken and useless, his lungs burning with strain. He reached up and smacked at MacMillan’s shoulders in a last, hopeless attempt to dislodge him, before falling back, limp in the chair.

“Take my seed,” MacMillan groaned, arching his back and sliding deeper, Dwight’s raw hole offering no resistance, the swollen glands and muscle walls searing until the pain became too much and he went numb again. MacMillan started thrusting with force, his testes smacking noisily against the backs of Dwight’s suspended thighs. He rubbed his hands down Dwight’s legs, smoothing the pallid skin with his mottled hands. “You will never be without me inside you. You will not escape me. You are mine. You are mine.”

In the morning, Dwight woke to a bustle of work outside his door, and thankfulness that his housemates had not come in to wake him, for the tears that had found their way to his cheeks in his nightmare embarrassed him. He wobbled on swollen legs to the kitchen, yawning and pulling one of Jake’s flannels over his arms.

The reason for their energy was that David was not in his usual place at the table for breakfast. Gathering his strength, Dwight pushed upwards from the bench, and found his way outside. David was not doing his morning chores, nor loitering by the porch with a cigarette in his mouth, as sometimes the morning found him. He was not in the cabin either, nor anywhere to be seen.

For a hopeless while, the three of them stalked the grounds of the camp, searching fruitlessly. David had not gone out to hunt, nor had he informed his employer of his whereabouts, nor had he taken anything, it seemed, of his belongings but a coat and heavy boots. What on earth compelled him to leave, Jake knew not, shaking his head in disappointment concealing worry. Dwight, with miserable realization, did know.

“He’s gone to the manor,” Dwight said, a pang of worry flashing through his chest. He’d gone to confront MacMillan. Dwight knew it, with little evidence more. He remembered the anger that flashed dully in David’s eyes the day previous, and began to renew his search.

“We must go after him!” Dwight said, imploring his companions, who were frightened into immobility. They looked at each other worriedly.

“Come, now!” Dwight insisted, and rushed into the cabin to gather his borrowed coat, his boots, his bag, and the keys he had pilfered long ago. The keys were missing—such only confirmed his impression as to David’s intention. As he stepped across the threshold, however, a pain like no other assaulted him and he fell to one knee, gripping the doorframe.

The pain fled quickly, only to be replaced by another, slashing through his middle like whips of fire. He struggled back to his feet, only to be forced down again by another cramp.

Nea came to his shoulder and lifted him against her. “Your pains are starting. I’ve seen my cousin and older brother in the same state. Come inside.”

Dwight shook his head. “No, I must go after David. He will not survive what haunts that mansion.”

If MacMillan was gone, the spirit of fury and vengeance that hung over that place like a miasma would capture David, feed off of his anger, make him its new master. Whereas, if MacMillan were alive, then…

Dwight struggled to think through another tearing, rending contraction that rocked through his abdomen. The pain seemed to shock all the way up through his ribcage and down his legs in electric spurts.

It was too early. _Months_ too early. Surely neither he, nor his child, could survive this. He moaned to Nea such worries, or at least he expected he had, the pain too disorienting to tell whether he was speaking his anxieties aloud or merely thinking them. He gripped Nea’s arms as she showed him to bed, where he moaned and writhed and felt his nightmares encroaching on the rising day.

The manor grounds were rather narrow, or so David thought when he came upon them, or else Dwight’s recollection of their scale to him was perhaps overblown in his mind. Three sides of the grounds were marked by a fence of iron, and the forth a dense wall of beech, ash and walnut trees. He charged through a narrow gate whereupon the haunting of the low sky over the manor, in grey and black and stormy green, chilled him.

The grounds were empty of life, scattered with old and broken bear traps, most snapped shut or rusted open, with grass growing over and through their jaws. There was an empty stable, and an empty shed, and the manor itself was dark as David stepped up to the front door and went inside with the keys he’d taken from Dwight while he rested.

Dwight was so…fair and even; nothing of him encouraged torment or even mistrust. He had accepted David so quickly, it nearly pained him. While he peered at Dwight, lit dimly by the lamplight from through his shed door, David was overcome with an unwelcome wrath he’d thought—hoped—he’d left behind in the old country. It sung in his bones and made his very blood caustic, the anger like painful spasms in his body.

David began to regret his choice to leave the cabin with naught but keys and his boots as the cold air settled around him. It was the cool, sharp air of nighttime, even though when he’d entered the grounds he knew morning to have just arrived. However, anger, for good or ill, kept him warm. He wanted to see Evan MacMillan’s skull splintered in his hands, his crumpled body begging for mercy, and those images alone fueled his journey.

As he entered the mansion, its foyer wide and untouched, with dust settling tranquilly on every surface, David felt the oppressive air of the grounds follow him like the spoor that followed a prey animal. He felt most trapped, perhaps fittingly, when he passed by a grand sitting room filled with animal trophies, rifles mounted high on the wall, and brackets to hold long knives and staves. The brackets were empty, as no doubt the guns were as well, and so David went on, passed a bedroom—the bed undressed, with sheets rucked up and crumpled, the kitchen, and a study in disarray. There was no sign of MacMillan, though he probably only recently left, if he was alive.

David’s anger turned to frustration with every door he pulled open, to find nothing behind it. He only wanted to see MacMillan’s corpse, to confirm he was dead, but the unmistakable smell of the dead was absent, and in its place were only the scents of old wood, smoke from the sconces, and the subtle decay of an old house.

He decided to proceed back into the grounds, where he saw nothing and no one. A shuffle of feet had him turning around, only to watch a massive cleaver nearly the length of his arm swing into his eye.

Dwight sobbed and gripped the bedclothes, pain wracking through his limbs like flames. He whined and rolled back and forth, and though reaching down he felt nothing of his baby coming, the tightening over his belly was impossible to ignore. He moaned and thought of David, bruised and battered, and tried to get to his feet, successfully walking a few steps before crumpling into Jake’s arms. He felt as though there were nails inside him, striking his insides, trying to burst out.

He brooded over the fire until it grew low and smoldering, the ashes wriggling with orange embers, like glowing worms in the cracks of the charcoal. He bothered not to relight it, for the heat no more soothed his ancient flesh than did the taste of food, the warmth of alcohol, or the touch of rain on his skin. It began to sob down in buckets early in the morning, stopping only now, to be replaced by a damp, persistent cold that flooded all the grounds with moonlit fog. He listened, silent, by the fireside, tilting his head to catch the sound of distant footfalls, and the telling latch of his front door.

MacMillan quickly snuck out the back door, into the grounds into which he was confined, silent as a lion pursuing its prey, taking only his cleaver with him. Rain began to shudder down from the sky again the moment he was outside.

Someone was here, in his garden: MacMillan spotted the press of a boot in the mud here, a crinkle in the blades of grass there… the lawn was disturbed but his traps were not; how did this intruder avoid his snares? It must’ve been someone who knew they were there—perhaps, his estranged husband, who escaped after gifting him a supplementary passageway for his blood? The scar was nearly completely sealed within a day as MacMillan, much to his chagrin, was dragged back to life by the thing that entombed him here, that hateful spirit, and put him back on his feet. Their marital bed was ruined, but MacMillan was barely harmed.

The trapper crept in through his own front door, tracking the path of the intruder who boldly entered the foyer, opening every door as he went, searching for something. He chased the man down, catching glimpse of him in the hallway, the reading room, kitchen and study. He saw him step back outside and that is when MacMillan struck.

The man—well-built, but unrefined and wearing the garb of a labourer—ducked to avoid MacMillan’s cleaver slashing at his head. He leapt away from MacMillan’s hands, and then, astonishingly, swung for him. MacMillan had not been challenged for what felt to be an age, and he laughed mirthfully when the shock had worn off. The man slammed a fist into MacMillan’s unguarded side and he grunted, lifting a foot to shove the man aside.

“What manner of man are you?” MacMillan asked, chuckling as the man tumbled to the ground, mud splashing and painting his clothes.

“One who will have you on your knees,” the stranger retorted, standing up again. He flung himself shoulder-first at MacMillan’s waist, impacting the steel-sturdy column of his middle but not shifting him in the slightest. He groaned in frustration and continued to shove, until MacMillan pulled him off with a hand around his throat, hoisting his chin.

“Stout, strong of heart and body…I laud your effort, young man,” MacMillan assessed and praised, tilting his head, the hideous mask turning with it as he peered at the stranger. “Tell me your name and why you came here before I extinguish your ability to tell anything ever again.”

The man wrapped his hands around MacMillan’s forearm, finding they did not fully encircle it, so wide the appendage was. He worked to pry himself free to no avail as MacMillan’s grip tightened, squeezing his voice with it.

“D…David King,” the man squawked out, his nails digging uselessly into MacMillan’s stone-stiff flesh, “…your tyranny… Dwi…Dwight…”

MacMillan paused. Was it so? He threw the man to the ground, watching him spill into the mud and struggle back to his feet. MacMillan kicked him in the chest, and then shoved him with a foot on his shoulder.

“So he’s found himself someone new whose caress to accept?” MacMillan pondered, “and you think yourself quite special?” He set his teeth, the jagged mouth of his mask flickering horribly in the dull light of the morn. He reached for David’s shoulder and wrenched him upwards, the man groaning and hissing through his teeth as he was forced to his feet. He swung, and grappled, still, with an opponent thrice his size, and MacMillan dispatched his struggles with a few strikes to the jaw and eye, until David was moaning and clutching his head.

“I’ll show you what special gets you,” MacMillan said, draggling David, who half-walked, half-crawled along as they went through the grounds. It was when Dwight left that MacMillan noticed it: a parting in the hedge that led down to the clearing, the opening of the fateful mine wherein a hundred men and boys were interred. The curse allowed him passage just as far as the secret shaft, the back entrance through which MacMillan entered, sometimes, with the blessing of his father, sending him on a secret errand, and then, later, crucially, without it. He cleared away brambles from the opening in the earth, the hole like a wide, waiting maw of mud and wooden beams, a simple chain across the width to mark privacy. MacMillan tore the chain with two hands as easily as if it were thread.

He hefted David towards the entrance to the shaft, dragging him until he was suspended half over the edge of the hole. Looking through bruised eyes down the endless shaft, he started to squirm and kick, holding tight to MacMillan’s hand around his neck.

“Would you like to go down there?” MacMillan teased, throttling David and forcing his bleary gaze to connect with the endless column of black that dove beneath the earth. “Hundreds of men, just as unremarkable as you—those are what you will see down there.”

David squirmed and fought, shifting his legs this way and that, like a deer trying to escape a snare, or a salmon a net. All it served was to kick up dirt about him and exhaust his trembling body.

“There is nothing special about you, you are as unremarkable as any found down there,” MacMillan assured David, “there was nothing remarkable about Dwight, either. He simply wandered close enough to trip my trap.”

David flew one last time to life, swinging uselessly for MacMillan with one hand while trying to avoid being choked with the other. His fists did not even connect with flesh; MacMillan only chuckled.

MacMillan hefted David up with one arm, holding him over the hole so his feet dangled hundreds of yards in the air. “Will you go down there and entertain the skeletons?”

“Evan.”

A voice came from near enough to touch, it seemed, the soft, warm timbre cutting through the silent fog of the wood. Could it be? MacMillan turned to see Dwight stood only steps away, within the clearing.

He looked…tired, but determined, the same as he had countless times when Evan took him, laid him on his back, bound his wrists, and held his thighs apart to plunge in between. Mahogany-brown eyes were red with exertion; his body was covered in a thick coat over disheveled clothing, and in his arms he ported a bundle wrapped in quilted cloth.

“My prize,” MacMillan answered, tilting his head, “look at what has happened. The curse has set me free: I can come down here, to this hideous mine, to this place that hexed me in the first place.”

The mine didn’t do it, Dwight knew, nor the heathen witch. It was MacMillan’s evil alone that cursed him.

“Let him go, my love,” Dwight said, his voice gentle. He was shivering a bit with the cold, but his look remained firm. “He does not come between us.”

MacMillan grinned, the ragged edges of his mask’s mouth seeming to curl upwards in delight. “Oh, but he does come between your legs, doesn’t he?” He shook his arm and David gagged and kicked before going limp. “To think I would be so swiftly replaced. Couldn’t stand to be empty?”

“Do you not want to be free?” Dwight asked, “out of the reach of the curse?” He took a step closer, and then another, steps halting as his shoes impacted the hard soil of the clearing. Around the mouth of the cursed mine, no greenery grew, only brambles that trailed in from beyond its perimeter.

MacMillan narrowed his eyes, peering over the bundle Dwight carried against his breast.

“Put him down without harm, and I will give you your child.”

MacMillan’s eyes grew wide through the darkened holes of his mask. He paused to peer only briefly at the man at the reach of his arm, whose trespasses against him and his manor felt worthless, suddenly, and brought him in, laying him at the edge of the shaft. The woodsman coughed in his weary state before falling prone. Dwight’s eyes left MacMillan’s for only a second to survey David’s injury before he began to approach MacMillan.

MacMillan’s focus was uninterrupted, and he stood with arms outstretched and gaze guileless as Dwight had never once seen it. The beast held out his hands and Dwight transferred the bundle to them, carefully, to support its delicate weight.

MacMillan’s breath seemed to stutter as he peered upon the bundle. His child. He remembered the words of the heathen wanderer who menaced him unannounced that night, years prior: he would remain imprisoned until he conceived a child, raised it, and nurtured it. Only once he brought up the child and the witch came hither to steal it would the curse be complete and lifted. His freedom was finally within his winding grasp. He looked inside the bundle.

Rather than a baby, MacMillan saw the hideous face of a totem of wood, something an ignorant woodland infidel might carve under a night of maddening winter solitude. MacMillan peeled away the blanket that encircled its shape, seeing nothing but more wood and roughly hewn sigils made with a knife. He seethed, he trembled. How? How had he been so betrayed?

He turned to Dwight, to find his lost husband lunging at him. At the edge of the shaft, and stunned into disillusion by the reveal, he could not keep his balance, and fell, tumbling, with the totem, the quilt, and his evil, into the bottom of the mine.

Dwight fell to his hands and knees, clasping a hand over his still swollen belly. It twitched distantly with pains of false labour, but they were subsiding quickly, in their place waves of relief and painless weight coming instead. He felt nauseous to look down the endless mineshaft, its terminus unseen, littered invisibly now by the hulking body of MacMillan, his life ended in the same place he’d ended so many others. Dwight peered over the edge, scrutinizing for a long while in the darkness, but seeing and hearing nothing from the hole, only the soft whistle of wind through the brushes surrounding the clearing.

He went over to David, who was now shifting onto his back and groaning. His body was marred with bruises and cuts, but he was in one piece, and awoke to Dwight hefting him up by the shoulders, bidding him sit. David’s eyes were both swollen and his nose crooked, blood finished trickling from his nose and lips and now resting on his skin in thick, vermillion lines. Jake and Nea arrived shortly from the clearing, rushing over dragging the pair of them from the edge of the mineshaft with no shortage of derisive censure.

“Fools! Good-for-nothings!” Nea snapped, face red with effort. Her bow slid from her shoulder and her knife was tight against her thigh. Jake settled for a darkly relieved, “to think I would lose two handymen in one.”

“I told you not to come,” Dwight said to David, genially, as he sat carefully on his knees and leaned on one arm, stroking his anxious belly with one hand.

“You told me I could not defeat him,” David replied, a smile peeking through the bloodied mats of his beard, “ _you_ could, it seems.”

Dwight smiled. “You’ll have another tall tale to tell, now.”

“I don’t plan to have anymore tales,” David answered, voice weak from rough handling, but clear just the same, “this will do well enough for a lifetime.”

Dwight felt a sigh come up from his chest, one of genuine relief and peace he had not experienced for several long months. They would go back to the cabin, now, to finish out the winter that was just starting to come. Dwight’s baby would be born early in the New Year, and bundled in quilts and furs safely away from the snow, he would deliver undisturbed. In the spring he would go back to the city to make a safer mercantile living, and invite David, if the woodsman had had his fill of the woods. Dwight’s fate was no longer sealed, no longer connected to that of an accursed beast that haunted a stately manor in the fog. His cruel marriage had ended, and life stretched out before him—for him and his child—through the trees and muddy roads.


End file.
